Page 99 - Contemporary Cultural Theory

STRUCTURALISM

practices as such. But the real theoretical innovation here consists,
first, in a new sense of this connectedness as necessarily internal to
discourse; and secondly, in a growing awareness of the human body
itself as the central object of control in such institutions as the modern
prison, but also as the source of possible resistance to that control.
This new recognition of the significance of human corporeality runs
interestingly parallel to that of Barthes’s The Pleasure of the Text.
For the later, but not the very late, Foucault, power in modern
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society has become essentially ubiquitous. Thus he speaks of its
“capillary form of existence…the point where power reaches into the
very grain of individuals, touches their bodies and inserts itself into
their actions and attitudes, their discourses, learning processes and
everyday lives”. But this very ubiquity of power renders it open and
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indeterminate: “it induces pleasure, forms knowledge, produces
discourse. It needs to be considered as a productive network which
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runs through the whole social body”. There is, then, no single structure
of power, but rather a play of powers. Foucault’s work is thus not an
“objective” account of discourse, positioned outside it, but rather a
strategic, or tactical, intervention into that play. The deeper affinity
between Foucault and Derrida, despite their apparent mutual animosity,
resides around this persistent scepticism vis à vis discourse, a scepticism
which seeks to identify the possibilities within discourse which discourse
itself seeks to repress. Both thus adopt an adversarial stance toward
dominant discourse in their respective practice of what one might
term disruptively immanent critique, the hallmark, I suspect, of a
peculiarly post-structuralist politics of demystification. But this is
demystification through relativization, rather than through the kind
of absolutist scientism which underpinned classical structuralism; its
central achievement and aspiration not the discovery of hidden truths,
but of marginalized inconsistencies.
For Derrida, and for the later Barthes and Foucault, knowledge is
social, and its scientificity cannot therefore be guaranteed. This is no
longer a problem, however, it is merely, pragmatically, the way things
are. Perry Anderson describes the emergence of post-structuralism
thus: “Structure therewith capsizes into its antithesis, and
poststructuralism proper is born, or what can be defined as subjectivism
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without a subject”. This latter phrase strikes me as very suggestive
of the way in which post-structuralism brings into play all the
indeterminacy of phenomenological culturalisms, but without any

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